As we, as a nation, consume more power and, in particular, as our peak power requirements soar, the expense of increasing the capacity of the entire grid is pretty staggering. A much preferred alternative is to shift usage patterns so that the peak/average ratio drops.

If energy use can be managed and billed on a real-time basis at the individual level, there is a huge potential for savings. For a variety of reasons, HF-BPL may make a lot of sense for this one application alone. Of course, as one interested in building out a much better alternative to HF-BPL, I would like to see a better technology which has no interference problems and is also capable of handling future individual information needs be adopted.

My opinion is that the ARRL is pretty much WSYIWYG, that there isn't a major hidden agenda. They seek to represent a large and very diverse membership in the matter of a hobby which is primarily fueled by discretionary interest and resources by the members. It must be a bit like herding cats.

In any group that large, there will be mis-statements and actions which don't always reflect positively on the organization but, by and large, I think that the ARRL sincerely tries to be what it purports to be: an organization that responsibly represents, supports and promotes amateur radio.

I guess I don't see any smoking guns.

My initial open letter regarding Corridor's technology was worded somewhat strongly because at the time, it seemed the ARRL was painting all broadband-over-powerline technology with the same brush, even after I had privately given one of the staff there the heads-up before Corridor's first technology demonstration and prior to some of the ARRL's early statements.

Evidently internal communications took a while to percolate, but once they understood the difference they were quite decent about taking E-Line on it's own merits and offered to be involved in helping assess it's relationship to amateur radio.

Corridor hasn't taken them up on the offer yet, perhaps it will before too long. The delay is only because we've examined it for ourselves and know there's no interference there at all, as I reported in the open letter.

I think that, at first, the ARRL may have gone a bit outside the technology issues in their original position but that was probably more of an errant emotional response than a political one. Since then I think they've communicated and acted very appropriately.

David: From your description of the capabilities of your own E-Line technology, it looks like it provides good capacity without any interference problems. Can you share with us any more detail on where it's going and when we might see it available ?

Glenn: Well, as I said, getting high speed information to and from the mobile information user is the toughest part of the last-mile problem. But if you can solve that one, you've pretty much solved it for the fixed user as well. From the information capacity plot you can see that to get truly high speed data to an end user in a typical suburban environment, it is absolutely essential that the length of the radio path be quite short.